The Cli-Fi Report is a portal for all things cli-fi, a subgenre of speculative fiction, with new links from blogs to videos to Wikipedia to Twitter to news links and Facebook Groups. See the portal, the largest Cli-Fi portal on the Internet at cli-fi.net / MEDIA inquiries at: danbloom@gmail.com

Thursday, July 20, 2017

Cli-fi has moved from what was once a fringe concept to what is now a very marketable literary genre

to Professor Jennifer Hamilton's recent pronouncement on an Australian website that "Cli-fi" has moved from what was once a fringe concept to what is now a very marketable genre of modern fiction, cli-fi has arrived﻿.

There's no stopping its rise worldwide now. It's in the air, and even the early naysayers who were skeptical about adding a new literary subgenre to traditional science fiction's many subgenres are coming on board now.

This is good for writers, for publishers and for readers. Cli-fi is here to stay, and most importantly, to make a difference. While Nevil Shute's 1957 pulp fiction novel about nuclear war and nuclear winter "On The Beach" ﻿was a very public warning about the dangers of nukes being used by military powers around the world, so too will future cli-fi novels, as yet unwritten, warn future generations of the dangers and risks of runaway global warming and unstoppable climate change. When will this new Nevil Shute arise and in what country will he or she reside?﻿ Time will tell.

Meanwhile, there is only good news for fans of cli-fi and for academics stuyding the genre. Jennifer Hamilton ﻿put in this way: "In a fictional sense, solarpunk sits across the table from "cli-fi". In recent years, the term cli-fi has moved from a fringe concept to a marketable genre of fiction. Coined in the first instance by a PR guy in Taiwan, it has grown so big that scholarly researchers are now able to produce studies of the genre's conventions. In addition, new novels and short story collections are now published in this gernre category each year."

Almost daily now, mentions of cli-fi appear online in book reviews, academic papers and magazine essays. A recent mention noted: "One could argue we live in the golden age of literary dystopia, with the resurgence in popularity of classics like George Orwell's '1984' and Margaret Atwood's 'Maddaddam trilogy,' as well as the emerging genre of cli-fi -- speculative fiction set in a place of environmental devastation."

It's true, a summer intern at the New Yorker magazine wrote in a blog post in 2014 ﻿that while "cli-fi was an interesting new genre term to think about, it probably won't last as a literary term." Well, that was 2014 and now it's 2017, and cli-fi is on a roll. The New Yorker was wrong when it wrote: ''These books have been labelled 'cli-fi' but chances are that the name won't stick."

So as we approach the last few years of this second decade of the 21st century, and as 2018 and 2019 move toward 2020, bookmark "cli-fi" on your computer and get ready for more and more novels using this genre as a global platform. It's written on the wind. We are here.﻿